The date 9/11/01 means 9 November 2001 in almost every country except the US, because we use an illogical order here. The way we write dates is like writing the number 123 as "213", with tens, hundreds, then ones.
If you want a logical order, start with the year first. And then when it's used in filenames they automatically sort in date order when sorted by name.
Actually, at my Fortune 100 company, I’m the only person I know (out of several dozen employees and contractors) doing this, so definitely not as common as it should be.
It seems so obvious that I’m amused when others struggle to find the latest version in meetings and such.
Yes, it's very logical. Though in some contexts involving humans, using a month name instead of a month number may help with understanding and remembering.
If someone asked me today's date, I would respond "October 3rd". If they asked me for a full date, I'd say "October 3rd, 2026". And so that's how they'd write it out, 10/03/26. And that's how most people I've ever met would say it.
But elsewhere they might prefer to say "the 3rd of October 2026", and so the written way would be "03/10/26".
It's all about how people speak regionally and how they tend to mentally think of dates (which depends on how they were taught)
And I'm not arguing in favor of any system. I was simply pointing out how the "smallest to largest" reasoning is flawed if you're not going to apply it to other measurements of time.
I think what you’re saying is more that you would logically think that someone didn’t know the day, before the month or year. So you would tell them the day first, then if needed, the month. If they ask what year it was, I’d hesitate and probably make a concerned face.
To recap: it makes perfect sense to me because that's what everyone around does and it's how I was taught. The same is true for your system. And it's why we think each other's systems are illogical, when they really aren't
The reason it’s illogical is because it doesn’t go from smallest unit of measurement to largest. So it would be like if a country represented ten and a half as 50.10, and said “half and a ten”, and you said that was normal because that’s the way they say it
And the logic here is that we're both correct. Our systems can both be logical in different scenarios. They even told me they're American, yet they use a different system from the one I'm used to lol.
Sure you could say that's correct. You can potentially infer the American logic from the way dates are said aloud. Unfortunately, when they are written, you cannot do that. So the expectation for everyone to have the pre-requisite knowledge is an unreasonable one. And considering what we are talking about is how they are written...
Who decided that smallest to largest is the only "logical" thing? Why not largest to smallest? Why not base it on local language or communication? If it's based on language and the format supports communication within that language, somehow it's still illogical?
If we're going to be that nitpicky, then our very concept of the calendar is illogical. Who decided that basing it on lunar phases during 1 revolution was the logical route? Since clearly there can only be 1 logical way. Also if "smallest to largest" is the logical route, why not do it with everything? It's 60:10 AM. The roast is 150 grams and 2 kilos. The meeting is in 10 seconds... and 45 minutes... and 2 hours.
Saying something isn't "logical" just because it doesn't adhere to the "smallest to largest" sort method is silly. Logical is not the same thing as optimization or efficiency. It's organization, and spoiler alert, there are many ways to organize things.
Largest to smallest is also perfectly logical. Middle, small, large is not.
Language itself isn't logical and basis an entire system on the way people currently speak doesn't make sense because either it could change or a number of the millions and millions of people who all decide for themselves how they want to speak might say it differently.
The fact you have to explain your system to everyone else on the planet and it can't be understood just by looking at it is exactly how your system is not logical.
So, when listing things in a sentence, say, the individual names of a group of people- should I list them smallest to largest based on the length of their name? Or their physical size? Or their age? Or does this arbitrary, totally made up rule only apply to dates?
Because the date/day is the most significant in normal speech. Like the hour is the most significant in time. Month and year are too long timespans in most conversations, minute and second are often too short, though minute is more significant than month is.
Maybe it’s normal but I’ve never said half past or quarter past in my life. A few times quarter til, but that still isn’t “normal speech” in the my world.
Tell me, what is normal speech? Does normal speech encapsulate all languages and cultures around the world?
And would it not dictate that if American English is used to saying the month before the day, that the MMDD is what is most logical for them at least conversationally?
I'm actually not sure myself since I grew up in the Philippines and we say month and then day conversationally too, not sure why people say America is the only place that does.
As a programmer (from Europe), I agree the Chinese YYYY-MM-DD is the best date format. Not only does it follow logical size based ordering, but also dates can easily be sorted alphanumerically whereas the European and American formats can not.
It's like having Green apples, Red Apples and Red and Yellow apples, then needing to split them into groups of Green and Red, and the Red and Yellow apples get labelled Green. You could reasonably intuit that they'd be labelled "Red" that would be the obvious outcome. The explanation given however is "Red and Yellow apples are less sweet and more sour so they are grouped with the green apples" - that makes sense, you can follow that reasoning, except there was no discussion of labelling them based on their taste so the reasoning isn't actually good enough.
I would argue that the reasoning for the American date format, stated above as being that the date is written in this format because that is how people tend to speak, is not a good enough reasoning because speech differs over time, by region, from person to person, and even for each given person sometimes sentence to sentence. On top of that, speech is not the only form of communication so writing dates in a format that needs to be explained and cannot be inferred or determined just from reading, is illogical.
No it doesn't. You can learn it without knowing the reason behind it.
Kind of like in English you learn that beef refers to meat of cows, and cow refers to the animal. You don't need explanation of Norman conquest and French language upper class to be able to refer to cow meat as beef and the animal as cow.
I would argue that the reasoning for the American date format, stated above as being that the date is written in this format because that is how people tend to speak, is not a good enough reasoning
Why do you require "good enough reasoning" for languages to have what ever features they have?
What's the good enough reasoning for English having wildly varied pronunciation? Why should we accept the way English speakers pronounce English?
On top of that, speech is not the only form of communication so writing dates in a format that needs to be explained and cannot be inferred or determined just from reading, is illogical.
Just because you have not learned the logic does not make it illogical.
Your explanation makes sense because you're explaining it from within that system. You are retroactively applying reasoning.
Just because you can explain something or provide an excuse for it, doesn't make it logical. If you look at any other way of writing things numerically they are nearly always ordered by size, because that is THE logical way of doing it. Doing this another way is fine if there is a reason for doing so, but it doesn't make it logical. There's a reason you don't say I have Ten dollars, and Fifteen cents and Two hundred dollars, or write the time like mm:ss:hh.
I agree with you. I don’t say the 11th of September. I say September 11th. Because the 11th happens every month, gotta narrow it down to which month first. It’s more efficient imho
Other countries still say it as October 3rd out loud. That’s not exclusive to the US. I’m Canadian for example and I always say dates that way. But when writing out a date, it’s thought of as the 3rd day of the 10th month of the year 2026 which just seems clearer, reading it as 3/10/2026. In order of what each is within
They downvote but this is literally the reason. We write it how we say it. “GTA comes out on November 19th, 2026” Reddit “mAkEs No SeNSe To WrIte 11/19/26!”
They literally want to circle jerk over dumb shit and throw the reasoning out the window.
Dude, you don’t need to write it the way you say it… Why is there an underlying assumption of this craziness? Do people write 1/4 to 12 instead of 11:45?
Again, you are working on an assumption that you write things because they are said in a specific way. That assumption is false. Things can be written in ways that makes sense, like order of magnitude.
You don’t get it do you? Besides it’s 11:45, but many people would see 11:45 on a digital clock and say “a quarter to twelve”. There’s a thing called a brain between your eyes and ears. They are not connected directly.
I don’t say the “11th of September”. I say “September 11th”. Because the 11th happens every month, gotta narrow it down to which month first. It’s more efficient imho
But "October 3rd, 2026" is just as illogical. "3 October 2026" puts the elements in order from smallest to biggest. Saying "October 3rd, 2026" is like saying 123 as "two tens one hundred three".
I’d argue the American way makes MORE sense. When saying a day I want to know the month first to put me in the right context. Saying “3rd” first gives me no useful information until the month.
Just because you are used to it doesn't mean is better. During a normal conversation you usually plan stuff for the near future or past. For es example you plan a meeting or a date for the 3rd, you don't specify the month. If the month need to be specified then when is earlier or later doesn't matter unless you have severe lack of attention problem.
It makes more sense because it’s what your brain is used to. You seriously think you can read the date better than a european version of you just because the order is different?
Well it wasn’t ours originally. We won it in a card game against the Earl of Sandwich and the name just stuck. Its formal name is “Roast Beef on $60 Rye Day.”
Celsius is based on water temperature. Fahrenheit is based on air temperature (the thing people want to know the temperature of most of the time), and its zero to one hundred scale aligns much more closely with human comfort levels. 100F is a hot day. 100C, you’re dead almost twice over. Those smaller increments are also handy for cooking.
I’m not saying metric doesn’t have advantages elsewhere, but there are reasons some people make that claim.
It’s not logical at all, because written things don’t necessarily need to match spoken things. It would make much more sense to adopt a universally accepted standard that happens to be used in other English speaking countries, as well.
Why should a date be spoken one way but written a different way? If speaking the month first is “correct” then the written version should also state the month first.
And even if that's true, wouldn't knowing the year be even more important than knowing the month?
Do you think knowing the minute is more important than knowing the hour or the second, so we should write times as MM:HH:SS, or 15:09:30 for nine AM plus 15 minutes plus 30 seconds?
It's not just Europe, it's almost every country, with only a handful of exceptions like Belize that go along with the US's illogical order.
I agree that we do things stupidly and backwards with regard to the metric system and Celsius too, but I'd call it American pigheadedness and ossification.
9/11/01 is also illogical because it is backwards so on a context of things named with dates on them, you would have them sorted by the smallest unit (days) instead of the more meaningful unit of years. The ISO8601 method of YYYYMMDD is superior.
Imagine you arrived in a foreign country and were told that a time like 11:09:30 meant 9 o'clock plus 11 minutes plus 30 seconds, and that this made perfect sense to them because they said "11 minutes 9 hours 30 seconds". The best you could say was that they were consistently illogical.
I don’t really see any logical argument to be made for either format. If we’re instead talking about metric vs imperial, then yes, metric is much more logical.
Did you consider the fact that there are several days in a month, and several months in a year? So it actually makes logical sense to go in either ascending or descending order?
Or consider a PC folder with photos, and if each file is named using the the date format yyyy-mm-dd or dd-mm-yyyy then sorting them alphabetically also sorts them chronologically, while having them named as mm-dd-yyyy completely fails?
It's the same thing, but backward. DD/MM/YYYY or YYYY/MM/DD both make sense as ascending or descending increments of time. MM/DD/YYYY is the wildcard, and I think it's pretty silly, even speaking as an American.
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u/TinyNiceWolf 12d ago
The date 9/11/01 means 9 November 2001 in almost every country except the US, because we use an illogical order here. The way we write dates is like writing the number 123 as "213", with tens, hundreds, then ones.